Premium – December second post!

Today, I have a few ideas to give you that I haven’t actually done myself, and so there are no example images. I plan to work on them in the coming week or so, but I am also focusing on getting my fine art work up to date on Fine Art America after a couple of sales this month.

I mentioned the number of times that I have seen a relatively simple image of a vial for a vaccine with the words Covid-19 vaccine written on it together with a syringe and then the name of the vaccine company on the table behind it. Those would be easy to do and although there are many images about, there might still be an opportunity to get some online. I wish I had checked this long ago, but you can order small glass vials and syringes from Amazon (at least you can in the USA), so I am finally having a go at that. I will try to cover all the global vaccines including the smaller ones that might not get as much publicity. There is also the big issue of transporting these vaccines around the country – especially the Pfizer one. So a few images of those cold boxes made from expanded polystyrene might be useful. I think I have one in the basement somewhere. Trying to get some dry ice creating a cloud of vapor would be great as well!

We are probably too late on that, but I think there is time for the next ideas. As you may know, Facebook grew by buying up the competition – in particular Instagram and WhatsApp – and there is an increasing pressure in the US (and probably by the EU) to control it in some way. In the US there is an investigation starting that is asking for the company to be broken up and those two components split out as separate entities. Of course Facebook has spent a lot on integrating them to make that difficult and will fight this hard, which means lots of articles about it. So images that simply (and cleverly) illustrate these themes should be good sellers. So think of various ways to illustrate them being pulled apart. A jigsaw motif perhaps?

There is also a related topic about the censorship that Facebook and Twitter are applying to certain posts and an obscure section of a law called Section 130 that gives them legal protection against being sued for what is on their platforms. I think that is potentially going to be another topic of interest and so I am thinking of images that ask if Section 130 should be repealed. I used to do Chalkboard ones like this:

I still have the Photoshop master images for these, but unfortunately have forgotten how I did the chalk writing – sad what old age does to you! I might try to work it out again, but time will tell!

I think the EU will also go after the big US technology companies for not paying enough tax – that could be a story that develops next year and would be simple to illustrate.

Anyway – hope you can think of some ideas for images around these themes.